On 23 Oct 2002 at 23:54, jalal wrote:

> 
> A quick plea for help.
> 
> I mentioned in a previous mail that I inherited a framed site... and tis 
> giving me some grief (as it did I guess the original designer).
> 
> The site has a central frame, which uses some fancy Javascript to scroll 
> a page in there. On all my computers I have no problem, but I've got at 
> least half a dozen reports that it doesn't work for some people. The 
> problem seems not to be the Javascript.

Thats only part of your problems.  According to commonly accepted lore, about 5% 
of the folks out there have JavaScript turned off because of pop-ups or fear of 
getting a bug from a script. Those folk can't view the site.

I also noticed that the JS code was not friendly to older browsers.  The page only 
displayed part way on my Netscape 4.6 browser and Netscape reported an error in 
the JS.

Then there is the issue of frames.  Several search engines have problems with 
framed pages and will not list framed sites. 

Lets add that up, you miss some search engines so you loose any possible 
customers from those, then you subtract 5% of the remaining because JS is off, and 
then you loose 2 -5 percent more folks that are not allowed to upgrade at work and 
then there's the die hards that refuse to upgrade.  That's not good.  A rough guess is 
that you are loosing anywhere from 75% to 90% of the potential viewers out there.

A side issue is usability.  The little red up and down arrows do not look standard and 
they are not in the right place.  I am sure that turns off some folk because they can't 
figure out how move up and down.  The page up and down buttons don't work on 
that page either. 

All the way around, that's a bad piece of code.  Whoever built the page did not test 
it very well.  I bet it doesn't work with older apple and linux browsers too. 

Many years ago I built a medium size website and after two months, several of the 
SE's were still not picking the website up.  This was in the easy days when anything 
got listed.  We rebuilt the site from scratch and all of a sudden life got much easier. 
Frames are not practical.  I no longer build framed sites. 

I think you owe it to the customer to talk them into going without frames.

See "Avoid Search Engine Stumbling Blocks" at 
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/tips.html

Over the years I have tried many JS and DHTML menus, I have tried Flash, I have 
tried layers and a host of other ideas.  I have found the KIS pronciple ( keep it 
simple )  to be important in web design.  

Paul Wilson
webguroo(at)tampabay.rr.com

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